'Only Offenders Can Stop Reoffending'

INTERVIEW / Mark Johnson

In the United Kingdom, as many as 75 percent of juvenile delinquents re-offend within two years of being released from prison, according to Prison Reform Trust's December 2010 Bromley Briefing Prison Factfile. This costs British taxpayers an estimated 11 billion British Pounds per year, and keeps nearly 2,000 young people behind bars.

Few people understand this as well as Mark Johnson. Incarcerated for the first time at 16 for a gang fight, he was imprisoned again at 18 for robbery. He was jailed on several occasions and has spent a total of four years behind bars.

After getting clean at age 29, he started Treewise, a tree surgery business that employed fellow ex-convicts, and wrote a memoir "Wasted" (published by Sphere in 2007). In 2005, his work with Treewise won him the Prince's Trust Young Achiever of the Year Award, and he became a special advisor to Prince Charles of Wales Prince's Trust on criminal rehabilitation. He later went on to found User Voice, a nonprofit organization that focuses on youth criminal rehabilitation in 2009, and this year, he became an Ashoka fellow.

Beginning within the Prince's Trust, Johnson piloted his vision in four prisons. Working with prison authorities, the program creates "Prison Councils" that allow inmates to voice their complaints and share suggestions for prison reform and inmate rehabilitation. Currently working in 10 prisons, User Voice has served 4,500 prisoners to date.

The organization "...gives offenders a voice in designing the system, and [being] heard at policy level," Johnson says. In addition to Prisons Councils, User Voice provides research and consultation to government offices and other criminal justice oriented organizations based on the insight of current and former inmates; it also organizes roundtables and other public meetings between government officials and ex-offenders to discuss ways to improve the criminal justice system.

According to User Voice's report "The Power Inside: the Role of Prison Councils", prisons with User Voice have surpassed 50 percent participation in the councils. Complaints from prisoners drop by 37 percent, and the numbers of days in which prisoners are kept in isolation (as a disciplinary measure) have gone from 160 to 47.

How did you become interested in public service?

I come from a troubled background. I had a violent, alcoholic father. My family wasn't very nurturing, and by age eight I found I could change how I felt by taking substances.

I was imprisoned at 16, and my behavior got worse. Not better. I later went into [adult] prison for violent crime, got out and then was living on the streets of London. I was injecting crack and heroin at the same time. After about a year on the street, I went to hospitals. A social worker got me into treatment. And I failed a couple of times. That's what happens: people fail a couple of times.

Eventually I got a loan to start a tree surgery business. I made it my policy to employ young offenders, so we'd have a therapeutic work environment. You have kids coming from prison, who have never been employed before. In about 4 years we had 200 people go through the program.

How you did you come to found User Voice?

We won a couple business awards [for the tree surgery business], and in 2005 were invited to the Prince's Trust Awards, with Prince Charles of Wales. I spoke with Prince Charles and he asked me to meet with a group of policymakers about the criminal justice system and work for his charity [the Prince's Trust]. There, I started a mentoring project [for young offenders], and in 2005/2006 I designed and ran the [Leaving Prison Mentoring] pilot project for the Prince's Trust. Now it's present in six different regions.

In 2007, I sold the tree surgery business and set up User Voice with my own funds.

What does User Voice aim to address in the criminal justice system?

There's a huge gap in understanding between the people who make the policy and those who live the reality. The people who make the decisions don't understand the nature of the problems of the people who often end up in jail. Society manages criminal justice on public protection rather than on therapeutic intervention of the people involved [in crime].

[Young offenders] have a catalogue of traumatic, abusive childhoods and backgrounds. We treat the problem really disfunctionally, exacerbating their problems and assuming that these people make a moral choice and know the difference between right and wrong. But a lot of these kids live in worlds of confusion; a lot of their boundaries are shattered or obliterated by abusive parents.

My work went toward bringing [the young offender's] voice to national policy. User Voice was named as such because it’s the voice of the people who use the services—in this case it's criminal justice service. It's about adding value, not about antagonizing [the system]. If you can get the voice of the people who used the services to say why it worked or why it didn't, then surely you can get better service.

What are the main activities?

We train ex-offenders as researchers, program managers, and send them back into prisons [to work]. We work with the whole prison and run democratic election campaigns inside the prison. The community votes, we provide training, and they meet the governor [prison warden]; they seek to resolve their problems with public counsel.

We work with London Information Services, and have done reports for the Children's Commission. We've also worked with the College of Social Work and the Ministry of Justice, among others.

What innovation does User Voice bring to the criminal justice system?

The problem with a lot of charities is a lack of scrutiny; service users are used by charities to protect its public image. Within the criminal justice system there's an unwillingness to listen. Lot's of people don’t understand that what [the prison system] is doing is containing the problem in prison and releasing it when a prisoner's term is up. We needed a mechanism to tell the governor (warden) what the problem is in a professional way. That way, we ultimately get better services.

Who is a typical User Voice beneficiary?

Many of them have had an abusive childhood, have grown up in [foster] care, in children's services. Their ages range from 11 to 21.

And what happens once the offender is released from prison?

People focus on employment, but they really should be focusing on employability. Someone out of prison, who uses prescription drugs for instance, needs to address the drug addiction becoming employable.
One thing that is often over looked is the entrepreneurial talent this group, and how you can extract it and employ it. What employers do is cherry pick, and take all the easiest to employ. Not those who most need the chance.

What makes an offender more or less likely to go back to jail?

Age is the biggest indicator. What that suggests to me, is that it's related to emotional development. It's just a natural progression into the criminal justice system. A large number of kids will never go to school. That world, because its designed for the middle class—people who have families and opportunities—is designed without taking into account the need for nurturing, something that these kid don't have.

Crime is a natural progression. If you don't have a family, then you're going to go with the people who care about you the most. The thing we need to understand about abuse and trauma is that it's not the event that does the damage. It's the feeling of isolation that results from it. Prison needs to be a therapeutic and educational response. We need to value emotion-based education as much as we do academic-based learning.

As human beings, we all have the capacity to change. It's all about being able to being in an environment where you can be honest with yourself. The criminal justice system is so detached, that nobody asks questions like: "Who are you? What do you want to do with yourself?" Prisons are just warehouses.

What changes have the Prison Councils brought about?

In our last project, with a group of 10 ex-offenders, we created eight system changes: one was guaranteeing a face-to-face response when a prisoner issues a complaint; another is the use of robes when children are strip-searched.  Participants also released an official complaint against excessive use of restraints in prisons.

What are the next steps for User Voice?

We're looking at different models for expansion.

More information:

www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Publications/vw/1/ItemID/72

www.uservoice.org

uk.ashoka.org/markjohnson